Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: with his required exercises, he did uot attain great distinction in his academic subjects. At the sophomore
exhibition in 1799 neither of the two principal appointments conferred by the faculty fell to him. Measured solely by those standards according to which academic honors were then, and have often been since, bestowed, Daniel’s college career was, indeed, considerably less brilliant than was that, subsequently, of his brother Ezekiel. The credit, however, for Ezekiel’s attainments rests iu no small degree with the younger, and on the whole the more capable, brother. When Ebenezer Webster, in the teeth of financial embarrassment and approaching old age, formulated his plan for the education of Daniel it was his purpose that Ezekiel, vastly superior in physical strength and accounted of no special promise intellectually, should remain on the farm, gradually to take over the heavier labor that was to be performed and, eventually, the care of the surviving members of the household. In this disposition of his future Ezekiel uncomplainingly acquiesced. To the sensitive mind of Daniel, however, the arrangement brought sore misgiving. Never were brothers more sympathetic and more inseparable than Daniel and Ezekiel; and that, by reason of his precarious health and greater boyishness, he had been shielded and humored in countless ways by his large-hearted brother, Daniel was much too honorable to fail to recognize. The relations sustained between the two are well illustrated by a little anecdote which, whether or not based upon actual fact, was long current in New England. The two boys, as the story runs, were once provided with a little pocket money and permitted to attend a country fair. When they returned in the evening Daniel wasenthusiastic, Ezekiel rather non-committal. Wh…